It's an honour to be with you today. I want to commend the work of your staff in helping me connect. I was a troublesome participant, but they handled it very elegantly.

I'd be very glad to answer your questions on federal fiscal policy.

Generally, the stagnation of Canadian productivity and earnings is now a lively topic of conversation. A decade of weak business investment has left us in a very unusual situation, where the stock of productive capital per worker is falling. I have provided the committee with copies of the C.D. Howe Institute's most recent report on that topic, and I think federal fiscal policy, among other things, could help.

I've circulated copies of the institute's most recent annual shadow federal budget. It contains a number of ideas that I think could help to spur economic growth and investment. Again, I'd be happy to answer questions on any of those topics.

Some of the measures in our investment report and in the shadow budget are contentious, but in my opening time with you now, I hope I can touch on something that should not be contentious. It should not attract a lot of partisan division. That's the need for government finances to be transparent and for government financial documents, particularly budgets, to be on time.

Too many people find government finances mysterious. The basics should not be mysterious to anyone who is motivated and who can read a few numbers. I think that budgets and estimates in public accounts documents should present the key information straightforwardly and up front. It does everyone a service if a non-expert can pick them up or open them online and can quickly and confidently get the essentials. If budgets and other documents obscure the key numbers or bury them so deep that a non-expert can't find them, they do us a disservice. People can give up. They can disengage, or worse, they may suspect that the obscurity is deliberate and that they can't trust what is in the budget or the public accounts.

Timeliness also matters. This is a familiar topic in Parliament. Budgets and estimates should come out together, before the fiscal year begins—well before it. Parliamentarians should be able to consider the fiscal plan and the individual items in the estimates before the money is spent. Public accounts and annual reports, for their part, should come out shortly after the fiscal year ends, while the information is fresh and before the opportunity to address any problems they reveal gets stale.

The federal government, for many years, set a good example with the quality of its budgets and its public accounts. It was, for many years, notable for producing timely budgets, but lately, the federal government has not set a good example. There was no budget at all in 2020. The budgets in 2021 and 2022 appeared in April, after the fiscal year had begun. In 2023, the budget appeared on March 28, which is much too short for Parliament to consider the fiscal plan before the year starts, and in 2024, it was on April 16.

We need only look as far as Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island to see provinces where budgets, regardless of the party in power, appear before April 1 consistently. The next federal budget should appear in February, as federal budgets used to, and its successors should do likewise.

This is a word on presentation. The federal government's grade in the C.D. Howe Institute's annual report card on fiscal accountability and transparency has recovered from the F it received after no budget in 2020, but it is only getting Ds and C-minuses. One point that I would emphasize is that the key numbers appear hundreds of pages deep in an annex. The rare non-expert who perseveres to find them may find them unclear because some major pension costs are shown below the line. The federal government does not present its main estimates and its budget together, and the accounting in the two documents does not match.

These problems are challenges for parliamentarians and for the public. As I said already, they discourage engagement and encourage cynicism, and they're unnecessary. Many provinces and territories do better. In our latest report card, Saskatchewan and Alberta were in the A range. We're finalizing this year's report card, and it looks as though Yukon will also be an A-grade jurisdiction this year. The federal government should join them at the top of the class.

Thank you for the invitation to be with you and for your attention. I look forward to your comments and questions.